AddisonP wrote:
> The "#" mean "sharp" in music, so it is occasionally referred to as the
> "sharp
> sign". It's also in use in North America (and elsewhere) as the "pound"
> symbol
> (unit of weight rather than money), whence the English name in telephony
> systems. However the actual usage as an abbreviation of "pounds" is rather
> obscure to most speakers of English, since it is usually used to mean
> "number"
> (and the equally non-intuitive outside the culture "lbs." means
> "pounds")...
>
Despite their similar appearance, the MUSIC SHARP SIGN (U+266F) and the
NUMBER SIGN (pound sign, hash mark, octothorpe, U+0023) are distinctly
different characters with non-overlapping usage. When correctly rendered,
the difference is evident. Older USAns, especially those with backgrounds
in IBM mainframe programming, are likely to think of "#" as "pound sign" and
to recall that "2#" is read "two pounds," while "#2" is "number two."
Gary L. Smith
Senior Consulting Systems Analyst
Database & Offline Products Development
OCLC
smithg@oclc.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:43 EDT